A little blog about me and the Autistic Spectrum. This will be home to my rants, raves, insightful posts, anything.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

More on meltdowns. (As well as falling behind)

I meant to post this last night but I forgot. Below it is today's post, combined into one because I didnt feel like spamming.

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Everyone grows up faster than me. I've felt like this before, like people grow up, and like I don't, and I get left behind. I don't know how to adjust to adult life. When I was younger, I was known for being particularly mature, now, as a young adult, I feel trapped between being a child and an adult, where other people my age are making this transition, and I'm stuck behind, unable to follow.I don't know how to take care of myself. I don't know how to do things that others find simple. As I've been getting older, my challenges have been becoming more apparent, because being in school was easy for me, but this isn't. And watching around me, other people aren't having this. They went through, they had discomfort as a teenager, they are still not entirely settled as young adults, but they are settling into adult life, getting jobs, and taking care of themselves. They're growing up.I'm not. I'm stuck here. And I'm left behind.I've felt left behind here at a few points in the past - I didn't grow up the same as other already. My friends from high school grew up before me. They grew up when they went to college in ways I didn't, and when they made new friends, I only found Bob, and when they started jobs, I hadn't, and they're ahead of me in life.

Mostly copypasted from a friend's blog because of how much I relate to it. Changed up a couple things, but the base remains.

Most people when they think of meltdowns think of the temper
tantrum-like meltdowns their children give them, or the sensory based
ones. Here is my view on 2 other types of meltdowns other than sensory
based. These are the most problematic for me and prevent me from doing a
lot of things others my age can.—–The 2 most common causes for me to meltdown revolve around the
inability to prioritize or organize thoughts, tasks, and emotions well
and emotional overload.Being unable to organize my thoughts or tasks (basically executive
functioning) can be very problematic but isn’t as common lately since I
haven’t been in college for a few months.When they do happen, it’s usually related to having a big task ahead
of me, but having a difficult time figuring out how to start on it.
Sometimes I’ll manage to begin but I’ll start breaking down in the
middle of it because I get confused or distracted a lot and lose my
focus and train of thought or pattern/routine. (A good example of this
was how putting away laundry took me several hours, because I couldn’t
figure out where to put certain pieces of clothing at or how to fold
them right. When there was leftover trash and misc objects laying around
the floor, I couldn’t start picking it up until my friend came in and
helped “jumpstart” the process.) I’m a smart person, I know this, but I
have issues organizing my thoughts, starting on tasks and following
through to the end. This becomes a HUGE problem when I’m in school. I
become completely unable to retain information that I learned that day,
and I’ll spend hours on a single question for homework until I’m up at 7
a.m trying to finish a worksheet due the next day. Combine that with
anxiety with asking for help and I start “melting down” and breaking
down into tears in frustration. These happen frequently when I’m in
school and are problematic because it becomes a catch 22.The emotional based meltdowns occur when I get overwhelmed from
feeling my own emotions “too strong” and instead of being able to calm
down and focus, I’ll get overloaded/overwhelmed by them and breakdown. I
can’t easily organize my thoughts and calm down before I get to the
breakdown point. When they happen, they’re incredibly hard to rebound
from.Usually during these, my ability to talk kinda diminishes. It becomes
really hard to communicate verbally effectively. I end up repeating the
same phrases over and over, and any attempt at really speaking gets
muffled out by the tears. These are most likely to happen during my
therapy sessions, and I’m very scared of them happening because of how
bad they feel and how vulnerable I feel during them (it’s not even an
issue of trust at that point, I just hate feeling that low.) When and if
it happens, moving to text-based communication will greatly help and
likely reduce the duration of the worst part of it.